I miss the mountains, etc.

Last week, Gerald and I completely disconnected from all things wireless and headed up to the land of giant, 3,000 year old trees at the Sequoia National Forest — a 4-hour drive north of LA. We stayed in a lovely cabin my late Aunt built, coined “Chalet Simone” (named after her much-adored siamese cat), which required a 1.5 hour drive up a twisty, steep, two-lane road (my cousin, who met us there to get us acquainted, could conquer it in 50 minutes — but us city boys drove it nice and slow like). The final destination was a dizzying 7,000 feet up in the brisk mountain air.

So high, in fact, that bags of chips and meat products we bought for the week in the city below were nearly ready to explode from the pressure change.

We cooked, I drove a quad, we fed some fish in a nearby pond day-old pancakes and polished off a case of $2 Chuck.

Have I mentioned the view?

(I won’t, however, mention the spiders, which I was warned were the size of “silver dollars” but were actually much bigger than that, and seemed to appear only at night on the ceiling. Hence my indulgence of cheap wine.)

It was quite lovely and freeing to know that the only way to connect with the world below was the cabin’s land-line phone. Not every adventure warranted a cleverly composed status update! Though, a touch of cabin fever may have set in at one point:

However, when we did eventually make it down the mountain to head home, my iPhone began exploding with 400+ emails flowing into my box. And about 350 of them I didn’t even read. DELETE!

Since we had some time to kill before heading to LAX and it was our first time in LA, we simply had to do the touristy Hollywood thing. So, of course, this happened:

Seems that when you put a wax celebrity next to me, I act a fool. I’m not proud.

At any rate, I’m getting back into the Chicago theater swing full-force, starting with the Non-Equity Jeff Awards tomorrow night. I’ll be crashing the party with a few other independent media people, serving up Chicago theatre blogger realness. Take a listen to our deeply informed award predictions, where things get rather … unseemly … not 12 minutes in. I blame the champagne. I’m not proud.